Category: Book Review

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 introduces us to the idea that it is possible to offer a public quest, which Caradon (the guy what made Threadbare) does, specifically, a quest to clean all the decaying corpses out of the basement. So apparently corpses rot in this world, rather than remaining preserved forever or dissolving completely after a fixed amount of time, both of which were also plausible for a LitRPG world up until now. The chapter also opens with some more familial conversation, and it’s still kind of petty and mellodramatic, but I’m wondering if maybe it’s supposed to be the emotional core of the story? Because the emotional core of this story is a one-armed teddy bear tearing his own arm off while yanking a shelf down on top of a marauding rat king. It’s a Rocky Balboa underdog story. To the extent that Celia is important at all, it’s because she can play the role of the kid in this picture:

Adding in family drama on top of that would be fine, but it has to be, like, actual drama. Not this “I can’t believe you had me doing laundry when you had a spell for it this whole time” shit, particularly since as far as I can tell Caradon’s position on this is in fact completely indefensible. He’s apparently just making his daughter do an unnecessary chore purely for the Hell of it.

I mean, look at this:

She snorted laughter into his chest, as she hugged her Daddy for all she was worth. “In fact, I’m proud of you for confessing what you did… what you THOUGHT you’d done. So I’ve come to a big decision.”

“Yeah?”

“I was planning on stepping up your lessons, telling you some of the things I’ve been holding back. You’re mature enough to handle the truth now, I think.”

The context doesn’t make it any more impactful. In fact, probably the opposite is true: Without any context, you can imagine that this is coming at the end of a conversation where some kind of actual character development has occurred, but no, Celia has confessed to something we didn’t even know she wasn’t supposed to do until she was confessing to it (she left the cellar door open), and this is apparently the impetus for Caradon to start teaching her the big girl magic, for some reason. Particularly coming on the heels of chapter 3’s “I could do laundry effortlessly but instead it’s your job to do it by hand because of reasons,” I am not feeling a single shred of this family dynamic.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Going In Circles” →

Chapter 3

The explanation of how regular animals can interact with prompts in order to become monsters is split across two pages and I don’t want to bother going through the trouble to highlight both fragments and combining them, but basically what happens is that if, for example, you are a rat and you are particularly good at being a rat by, just hypothetically, sneaking into someone’s cellar and finding all of the food, this gives you a rank up. If you happen to express approval rather than negativity in response to the rank up prompt, you will become a monster.

This brings up again a question first raised by Threadbare’s own ranking up shenanigans earlier: Why is there even an option to say no? Shouldn’t the only answer be “OK?” Is there some kind of opportunity cost for leveling up?

Anyways, the rat king is sending its children to eat Pulsivar and Threadbare alive, because apparently it cannot tell that Threadbare is inedible.

Pulsivar moved with lightning speed, sweeping out with his claws as they came at him, dancing back and batting them away as they came, but there were too many angles to cover. One larger rat took a bite out of his tail with its chisel teeth. Another one latched onto his ear and the cat howled, spraying blood as he shook his head, sending the rat flying as a red number ‘5’ floated up to the ceiling.

Apparently the cat vs. rat match-up is way less lopsided in Threadbare than it is in Outside.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Kill Ten Rats” →

Chapter 2

If he’d been capable of reading, they would have let him know that he had a choice to make.

NEW SPECIES JOB UNLOCKED – BEAR DO YOU WISH TO ACCEPT THE BEAR JOB AT THIS TIME? Y/N?

Just in case readers forgot what the prompt said between chapters, I guess.

Everything spun, and then WHUMP, the teddy bear landed on the bed. He sat up, shaking his head—

—and found himself in a pile of stuffed animals. Frozen, stiff, they stared at him with mute eyes.

The teddy bear trembled as he poked at them with his paw pads. They didn’t move. They looked just like the skunk had after he’d killed it, with the, the same unnatural stillness.

Ha. This is an interesting misunderstanding. It’s a fun exploration of the idea of a teddy bear golem, though. Threadbare isn’t just having the protagonist be a teddy bear and then giving him otherwise perfectly ordinary LitRPG adventures, it’s telling a story that would only work for a teddy bear (or similar toy golem, anyway). I’m kind of killing it by drawing so much attention to it, but if you wanted to experience the book yourself, you should be reading it on Royal Road.

And the teddy bear’s young mind jumped to exactly the wrong conclusion.

…yes, Threadbare, you’ve been more than heavy enough with your implications, pretty much any reader can suss out that-

I am among the dead. She means to kill me!

Goddammit, Threadbare.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Magic Tea Party” →

Readers, I owe you an apology. Several months ago, when I haphazardly updated this site’s look to serve as more my personal platform than anything with a particular purpose, I changed the tagline to “I guess this is a LitRPG blog now?” And since then I have not done any LitRPG blogging. This is clearly a complete betrayal of the sacred bond that exists between a plant commonly used to make tea and an unhygienic space messiah, a Romanian who blogs about blogging, a creepy little horned thing, and the rest of the ragtag assortment of followers my literature blogging carries in its wake.

Today I’m restoring that trust. Today we’re talking about Threadbare: Stuff and Nonsense, a LitRPG book that began as serial fiction on Royal Road Legends and is now on Amazon. I went ahead and bought the more up-to-date and edited Amazon version of this, so I can say I gave it a fair shake in case I end up hating it.

Chapter 1

It didn’t know that the hard thing it was sitting on was a wooden shelf. It failed to comprehend that the brown thingies lashed around its limbs that ran down through the holes in the wood were ropes binding it in place. It had absolutely no concept of books, which were the things that filled the shelves across the way. It couldn’t tell you that the oddly-shaped thing three slots down from it was a wooden hobby horse, or that the thing two slots down was a stuffed ragdoll, or that the black-and-white shape next to it was a taxidermied skunk.

People interested in incessant ranting may find this series of posts disappointing, because there’s some pretty decent signs that this book will actually be good. On the one hand, there is an apparently completely extraneous prologue that I have entirely skipped over, but on the other, it’s like two pages long and so far as I can tell mainly serves to reassure jittery LitRPG readers that yes, there are stats and such in this book, regardless of whether they’re shoved in your face in the first two or three goddamn pages. LitRPG readers are weirdly obsessive about the presence of numbers in the text. Not the presence of numbers in the setting, mind you, but the actual presence of numbers in the text. It’s not enough to say that people have HP, a decent chunk of the LitRPG audience will not be satisfied until you show them exactly how much they have and how much they’re losing to any given blow. So probably that page and a half of prologue is just there to say “look, a character sheet, now calm your tits and read the goddamn story.”

Looks like I was able to worm some ranting in about things other than the story, so that’s good.

This first paragraph does a pretty good job of setting up our protagonist and our location, fixing in mind the presence of various props (the skunk, the horse, etc. etc.) that presumably will be relevant in the ensuing scene, while also establishing mood. Making these early paragraphs pull double duty like that is a pretty good sign for the story overall.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Cheering for the Protagonist” →